


Negative Space

by lantadyme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-01
Updated: 2011-06-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 00:24:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/206829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme/pseuds/lantadyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aradia tries to remember what it was like to feel things again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Negative Space

**Author's Note:**

> The original prompt for this was for something where Aradia, being dead and therefore not having a physical presence, takes possession of the body of another troll for a short time so that she can be with Sollux, communicate and touch him like she did when she was alive.

_Not here,_ the voices whisper. _Not here, not now, there are things to do, things to plan, things to nudge into action,_ they say, and it is no longer simply words and phrases in Aradia's mind. She feels them; an empty presence tugging at a hollow in her chest, tugging in the place where her heart used to be, and it aches without hurting, impossible to ignore.

 _Things to do._

The voices urge her to leave this place and tend to them, but Aradia doesn't plan to follow their lead just yet. She tips her head back and looks up into the smog-choked city sky. The clouds are bathed purple and green in the moonlight. The wind would ruffle her hair if she were alive. Behind her, Sollux' lusus growls and paces, its chain dragging against the concrete roof, and after half an hour of sitting here in all this familiarity, still she feels no ebb to that emptiness that is the polar opposite of how she used to define herself.

(It is so hard to remember what she was like before her death. So so hard. Her hive is decimated and wiped of any trace of her previous existence; the caverns she used to frequent are echoing and empty of the presence of people not dead. Not knowing where else to go, Aradia drew herself here. To the hive of her friend, the boy she remembers feeling more than simply friendship for, and maybe if she haunts his rooftop long enough she will find an glimpse of what she used to be. She knows at one point in time she was more than this husk—dead and devoid of emotions—and she would like to find that again and be that again despite everything the voices tell her about how impossible it is.)

Something is missing inside her, something is wrong, and no matter how many times they tell her it doesn't matter, Aradia does not want to be okay with that at all.

She has time to tend to the tasks of the voices. All the time in the world, although she's not quite sure how time is stretched to an infinity. Aradia is okay with that, though. She's okay with a lot of things now, and eventually she will peel back the secrets of this strange intangible plane of existence she's been locked into.

She's okay with waiting, the voices tell her. And she is okay with being dead.

(And that is a lie she finds more difficult to disbelieve with each passing hour.)

She drifts down from the rooftops. Her hands settle at the windowsill and she could easily slip inside through the sheer rock and stucco of the wall, but for a moment she rests there and looks inside instead. (It tugs up a memory—her hands resting just like this, the wind at her back and whipping at her hair, a smile spread wide across her face as her eyes shone, waiting—and though she can recall the visual cues, all she remembers of her feelings in that instant is a hollowed out empty, echoing with the wrong wrong nothingness and why she is okay with that she does not know, does not want, and if she could feel she would be frightened and angry at it.)

It's dark inside. The computer monitor glows and Sollux is slumped in front of it, his hands not on the keys and his eyes pressed into his wrists as he sleeps. Aradia isn't sure how long he's been there but she can see the disarray of the rest of the room. Food wrappers are piled around his chair, gamegrubs wandering aimless and half-starved, other evidence of his depression scattered everywhere like bones in a digsite. She's seen him depressed before but even though she remembers her sympathetic feelings in those times, now she cannot dredge up the smallest inkling of pity. It simply is; a cold reality. Sollux is sad, and Aradia doesn't care. She cannot feel anything even as she tries to. She reaches out for that lively, happy girl she remembers being, but all she finds inside herself is dead emptiness and that's the opposite of what she wanted to discover.

She needs to remember how to feel. The memories are here—both of them sitting on the roof and smiling as Aradia pointed out constellations; Sollux designing a game for her and both of them playing it together; resting back to back and talking over the hum of his bees. Aradia remembers being so happy in those times. But even remembering it doesn't remind her how to feel for herself again.

She presses through the wall, needing to get closer even though she knows it will not change anything. She passes through the wall like the voices pass through her head, so easily ignored for their strangeness but powerful and corrupting nonetheless. Sollux' room is as warm and claustrophobically closed-off as she remembered it, hot and still and rich with the salty-sweet stink of bees and honey. She feels no lingering fondness, no dislike; she feels simply nothing, and in that emptiness she misses her lungs if only so she could sigh.

Feeling is impossible to remember. Aradia knows that eventually she will stop trying simply because it's so pointless. She is not her old self, is growing more okay with that with every tick of the clock, but she still feels the absence of everything like the loss of her shadow, unnatural and wrapped in the last clinging remains of what she thinks is unease.

Karkat stomps into the room.

He growls as he sees Sollux, all teeth with his hands clenched like a brawler. He takes Sollux' arm and lifts him out of the slump across his keyboard, scowling as he shakes him so violently that for a moment Aradia realizes she should be concerned. Sollux snaps awake and struggles to pull away, wincing back as Karkat drags him out of the computer chair and throws him to the floor hard enough to bruise. He crouches there over him threateningly, Sollux frail and thin and Karkat short and compact and built like a wrestler, and he grabs a fistful of Sollux' shirt and hisses out words through a cruel grimace.

"Fucking stop this. She's dead. She is fucking dead and no amount of you being an absolute scumsucking moron and sitting here in the dark moping your ass off over her is going to change anything. I am so fucking tired of your shit right now. I want to go home. I want to sleep in my own hive and not have to listen to your stupid fucking bees every second of every day, and that's about the last fucking thing in the universe that's going to happen until you get it through your thick worthless excuse for a mutant brain that you need to just get over yourself already. You're a shitty friend like this, Sollux. Put some fucking effort into your miserable life and stop making me look after you. She's the one that's dead, not you. Stop treating yourself like the opposite is true." He snarls with all his sharp teeth and throws Sollux at the floor again, and not once does a flash of purple psionics stop that. Sollux is resigned, quiet and with his eyes downcast, and that only makes Karkat more angry. "God, I just want to gut you right now."

Aradia moves closer without thinking, moves to put herself between them because _Sollux is important don't let him die he's important in the future protect the future._ She knows she's invisible, intangible, nothing but air between these two boys. She knows that. But something else whispers to her that she's more than air—she is a psychic echo wrapped in destiny and when she reaches out and grasps Karkat's shoulders, she isn't surprised by what happens.

 _—anger disgust frustration fear hatredpity hopelessness rage—_

They snap like lightning through her head, through her empty heart and through her shattered soul, and vivid memories flash through her mind as she remembers every time she felt those raw, crystallized emotions. She _felt_ them. They were _real,_ solid like the walls of this room and the body she's in now, air rushing into lungs and hands clenched in furious claws, and Aradia knows for a fact that she has never been so angry before in her life.

She surges forward, snarling and violent. She will rip him apart atom by atom like he did to her; vaporize him in a searing flash of energy and betrayal. She sinks those claws into Sollux' shirt again and wrenches him up to her face, roaring, "You murderer!"

It comes out in Karkat's voice, scratchy and raw and deeper than her own but wrapped in Aradia's cadence and pronunciation. The strangeness of that mix startles her.

 _Wait!_ she tells herself. _Wait wait!_

(The voices are so quiet like this, so quiet she cannot hear them, and for the first time since she died Aradia isn't sure what to do, doesn't have the future dictated to her in unintelligible scrambles, and that is liberating and terrifying at once.)

Sollux drops back to the floor as her hands go slack, his eyes wide now, confused and horrified as he inches back away from her—from Karkat. His mouth works around words that clog in his throat and don't make it past his lips. "KK?" he manages, swallowing and staring at her because he recognized that cadence in Karkat's voice, that familiarity, and believing that so close to insanity.

Aradia is still so angry. All of Karkat's anger bubbles up in her like a demonic presence, his rage and his shame and his fear and his hatred all struggling for dominion in Aradia's hollowed out mind—but the moment has passed and even now she realizes she doesn't truly feel those things. Those are things that Karkat feels, things she can only taste and sample in his body, but can never really feel for herself.

She presses the anger away. Her hands fall to her sides, her face relaxing from its snarl, and with that familiar calmness back in her heart, Aradia takes the first deep breath she's taken since she was tripped into oblivion.

"You need to stop this, Sollux," she whispers, so quietly, so softly, and it sounds so strange in Karkat's voice. "You need to move on. Please."

"What'th happening?" he breathes, fear still naked on his face and his back pressed nervously to a beehive, not sure and terrified for wanting to believe it.

"Please," Aradia says again, stepping forward so carefully and kneeling in front of him, knees tucked together as if she were wearing the skirt she wears in her ghost form. Sollux flinches back from her, his eyes wide and his mouth still gaping and confused and so scared—this is his best friend he's seeing wrapped in Aradia's calm, graceful movements, and that is so alien. "I want you to be happy," Aradia breathes, and she reaches deep into Karkat and finds just enough empathy to make herself smile.

She kisses him. He sits there frozen, his mouth slightly open as Aradia presses her lips to his. She takes his long, slender hands in Karkat's stubby, strong ones and hugs them warmly to her chest as she'd done so many times when she was alive. Sollux whimpers, still so frightened and confused; Aradia knows he recognizes the gesture and the way she kisses and moves and breathes, and when he kisses back she can taste his tears around Karkat's strange sharp teeth.

"Please," she whispers again with that same smile, looking into his bicolored eyes, his glasses gone and all his grief and guilt bare in his tormented eyes.

That's all the time she has.

The moment collapses. Her soul is funneled out of Karkat, hurled out of him with the spinning wrongness of a foreign energy, and Aradia feels the anger and the fear and the scant happiness ripped away from her like bones wrenched painfully from a still living animal. The absence aches, pulsating and stinging inside her, and oh, it is so terrible to remember what she's lost.

"AA?" Sollux whispers desperately as Karkat sits back and holds his head, his face contorting with the pain and the weirdness of that moment of possession that he will likely never understand. Sollux jumps forward and touches him, grasps his shoulders and looks into his face with all the hope in the world, and Karkat only scowls back at him with an expression that is so quintessentially Karkat that Aradia watches Sollux' hopes shatter irreparably as the tears fill his eyes.

"I'm sorry, Sollux," she says, stooping in her invisibility to press a nonexistent kiss to his forehead. Even as she does it she knows it's a lie. She is not sorry. She can't feel sorry, nor does she feel the smallest ounce of pity as she kisses him. She feels nothing. She feels empty, an emptiness so vast it washes through her with all the expansiveness of the ocean, and Aradia knows now why the voices had told her to leave and stop chasing her feelings—her life—when that is now little more than a ghost's weight.

 _Things to do things to do_ echo in her head, things the voices tell her are important and valuable even though she does not understand, and Aradia stands there and watches Sollux cry and she feels nothing.

She is not built for emotions anymore. They are not a part of her, and Aradia knows that while she is not okay with that, she will have to learn to be. She will have to learn to be okay with letting them go because chasing the feelings she can barely remember only delays her purpose in this strange existence she's been thrust into. She has things to do. Always things to do, and she looks down at Sollux weeping at her feet and knows he will be better without this.

Perhaps she will be, too.

And so she leaves without a backwards glance, the last of her tattered heart left behind her as she faces into destiny and embraces her strange strange future.


End file.
